Robert Kolar — Health insurance expert
Robert Kolar.
Health insurance expert
Over twenty years in Swiss insurance, spent on the distance between what a health policy promises and what it pays when a claim actually lands.
Works in German and English at full pitch, plus Czech as a working language for Czech, Slovak and broader Central European clients.
He says "stay with what you have" more often than he recommends a switch — which is the sentence that separates an adviser from a salesman.
The desk, precisely.
The policy you already hold
Read on screen, clause by clause — cover area, exclusions, claim procedure, renewal terms. The brochure language and the claim-handling reality are different documents, and the review reads both.
International private medical insurance
Which shape of IPMI fits the household: cover area, deductible, underwriting basis, and what each carrier’s paper actually does at renewal and at claim. The age-curve trap lives here, and it is checked on every review.
The employer’s plan
What the group cover genuinely includes, who in the family it misses, and what happens the month the job ends — the question the offer letter never answers.
Country transitions
What a move does to cover already in force: policies written for one jurisdiction behaving differently in another, waiting periods that reset, and the gap between leaving one system and being accepted by the next.
The discipline behind the desk.
Robert built his desk inside the Swiss system — basic, supplementary, hospital and accident cover, twenty-plus years of it, and the Swiss practice at expat-savvy.ch still runs on his contract-reading. Switzerland is the strictest insurance market most people will ever hold a policy in, and it teaches a particular discipline: the contract is the product, and everything else is marketing.
The international desk is that discipline pointed at a harder problem. An internationally mobile household has no regulator making sure the pieces fit — the policy has to do the whole job, and the wording decides everything. So the review reads the wording. Standard policy, supplementary conditions, exclusions, claim procedures, definitional clauses — before any recommendation, every time.
He has also been the foreigner working out somebody else’s health system from the outside, which is its own kind of qualification. The reviews read like translation, not sales.
Robert reads what you hold before the call, so the forty-five minutes start with your situation rather than a questionnaire. Expect direct answers, the reasoning shown, and at least one thing you were sold that he will tell you to keep.
“I say ‘stay with what you have’ more often than I recommend a switch. The underwriting cliff doesn’t care how good the new product is — and most existing policies are working better than the household assumes.”— Robert Kolar, as published on expat-savvy.ch
Where this discipline was built.
Robert also runs a desk at the Swiss practice, expat-savvy.ch — advising internationals inside one of the strictest insurance markets in the world since 2017. Languages there and here: German and English at full pitch, plus Czech as a working language. On this site Robert advises internationally; where cover is placed, it is placed through SIP's licences — the arrangement set out on the about page.
The rest of the team
- Nicole Bohne — Life and protection expert
- Virginie Josten — IPMI expert
- Davide Nezel — IPMI expert
- Chantal Leprêtre — Client Advisor
- About the practice
Ready for a calm conversation about cover?
A first review is free — 45 minutes, in English, wherever in the world you happen to be. We'll listen first. Then you'll hear exactly what we would arrange if the situation were ours. What you do with that is yours to decide.
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